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Mountain Bikers are notorious for focusing on riding longer and/or harder to increase their fitness. I often think and act that way as do a lot of our students and, at first, it works! Sometimes it works for a few years even a decade, but it will come to an end and there are easier faster ways to get fitter. Since starting BetterRide in 1999 I have stressed the importance of functional strength (how much power you can consistently put to the pedals) and “gym” strength (how much you can squat or bench press) and I personally saw doing a good job on creating functional strength. Then, I got injured and slacked off on both my resistance training and my mobility routine (yoga and myofascial release using foam rolling and tennis ball rolling) and this winter (a year after the injury) I have been paying for that laziness. My back has gone out three times since Feb 6th and it has been rather depressing. Well, thanks to a link James Wilson shared my back problems are gone and I have more power on the bike than I did before my injury (when I was working out and doing yoga).

The culprit was my gluteus medius, it was tight, really tight! Probably 90% of mountain bikers have tight gluteus medius muscles which can lead to hip dysfunction and back pain. Always the skeptic I did a bunch more research on the good ole inner-tube and found a few more article advocating the same methods to fix this hip issue. So I simply followed the advice in the article James linked to and the next day my back was barely sore. For once I was patient, which is tough to do in Moab, but despite my better feeling back I took Saturday and Sunday off from riding to make sure my back pain was gone and hips were functioning correctly. Then, on Monday Dave and I did my annual Birthday ride on Porcupine Rim and I was amazed how good I felt. We stopped when ever my hips started to feel tight so I could loosen them up (every 20-30 minutes) and by the time we hit the pavement I was feeling better than I have in months! The real kicker was how strong I felt on the 4 mile ride back to town, strong as an ox! It was my 49th birthday but I was pedaling like I was in my thirties! I took Tuesday off then rode hard on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday! I’m back! With more energy than I have had in months!

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On trail you aren’t doing what you know you are supposed to do! Every riding “tip” you have heard or read isn’t working because you don’t mountain bike with the part of your brain that listens to those tips! I know because I was a frustrated, professional mountain biker racer with 10 years of mtb experience who realized that I was looking down, a lot! Despite being a former professional snowboard racer and a snowboard race coach who was always stressing the importance of looking ahead (and was damn good at looking ahead on a snowboard). The listening part of your brain is great at mental tasks, solving math problems, remembering your childhood phone number, reading this blog and THINKING! When riding our bikes we don’t want to think! As a matter of fact thinking is the worst thing we can do. When we are mountain biking well he are simply doing, not thinking, not trying, we are on “auto-pilot” and just doing! Riding a bike is a lot like driving a car, have you ever gotten home from work and as you pulled into your driveway thought, “how the heck did I get home”? You don’t remember the route, you certainly don’t remember turning on your blinker, applying your brakes at a stop sign, looking both ways and then turning left. You don’t remember because your “big”, conscious, thinking brain isn’t being used to do the task of driving.

You don’t mountain bike with your “big brain” because your cerebellum (“little brain”) controls your motor skills and the best way to teach it is through practice. When I explain something to you your “big brain” says, “yes, that makes sense, I will do that from now on” but your “little brain” will go out and do what it is used to doing, not what I just taught you. This is the reason coaches invented drills for sports, musical instruments and even math, because there is a big difference between understanding and doing.

I bring all of this up because when I was out riding on Saturday I saw the most interesting thing. I was descending and saw a rider climbing the trail I was going down, so I pulled over to give him is right of way and watched him climb. He was staring right in front of his front tire, for at least 30 seconds! Yet, this guy works for a large bike manufacturer and has been riding for nearly two decades. I know if you asked him, “is it important to look ahead?”, he would say “yes”! Yet, he wasn’t looking ahead, not even for a second and he was weaving all over the trail and really struggling. So he knows to look ahead but isn’t doing it because he hasn’t taught is body and his cerebellum to look ahead.

Wow, pro xc racer looking straight down at the entrance to an easy banked corner at the National Championships!

When you are just learning any new motor skill involving the performance of complex sequenced movements like mountain biking or talking or writing, etc., you use your primary motor cortex, your primary sensory cortex (in order to monitor how your muscles are moving) and two other regions of the brain called the caudate nucleus and thalamus. The role of the caudate and the thalamus is to help coordinate and smooth out the movements in response to how the movements feel to you. They also help you to speed up your movements as you become a better rider.

After you become a highly experienced mountain biker, another region of the brain usually takes over; it’s called the cerebellum (or little brain). Whenever we perform a well-learned movement we access our cerebellum to retrieve the memory of how to move our muscles quickly, efficiently and without thinking. This is why thinking while riding usually gets in the way of riding well. Once you know the movements needed to do the skills to ride well, the cerebellum allows you to execute them without thinking about how to do those skills.

Another Pro XC racer looking down (and way out of position). So sad to spend all that time and energy training to be that fit only to lose 2-3 minutes an hour because of poor vision techniques!

In the case above (experienced rider looking down) he has practiced the incorrect method of looking down so much that now is cerebellum is telling him to look down. If he gets wise to the importance of looking ahead it will take months of doing structured vision drills to reprogram his cerebellum so that he starts looking ahead on the trail. A great case of you aren’t doing what you know you are supposed to do.

Through this blog, our free mini-course and our camps we really want to help you to ride your best. Please don’t let your ego trick you into thinking that because you “know” a particular skill that you are actually doing it. I have had the pleasure of coaching motocross racers, GP motorcycle racers and car racers, all sports which require looking way further ahead than we do on mountain bikes (because of their much greater speed). The interesting thing was they were all surprised (and often angry) at how much they caught themselves looking down on their mtb. It surprised me too! It turns out that “little brain” training is sport specific. So do the drills in our mini-course, do the drills in our blog articles and if you have been fortunate enough to take one of our camps do the drills from the camp. Knowledge is worthless until you can consistently put that knowledge into action!

Create your best ride yet,

Gene

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Often the best athletes in a sport don’t make the best coaches. I was reading the book Blink the other day and it talked about Andre Aggassi’s advice on how he puts so much top spin on the ball. When explaining it to his coach and other coaches he stated that by turning his wrist over as he hit the ball it gave him the top spin. Well the coaches believed this (after all Andre was one of the best players in the world) and started teaching their students this. Well, an interesting thing happened, there was a huge rise in wrist injuries among young tennis players. After careful motion analysis the coaches saw that Andre’s wrist never moved, the “top the ball motion” was actually generated at his shoulder not his wrist.

Reading this reminded me of all the movements in riding that I now explain quite differently than I did 5-15 years ago. The skill hasn’t changed but after years of study I realized that I was often explaining the outcome of doing it correctly but not the actual fundamental skill. Effective coaching involves breaking skills down and being able to explain them to a diverse group of people. Then the goal isn’t to just convey knowledge but to get the rider to actually do the skill, correctly, in ALL situations. We must explain and demonstrate how to do the skill, why/when to do the skill, how it should feel, all explained 3-4 ways so riders with different learning skills and backgrounds ALL understand. One of the most fun aspects of my job is after 20 years of coaching I am still learning how to explain skills better. The learning of skills continues too, after 15 years of coaching mountain biking I am still learning a lot of little details on how to do skills better/easier/with less effort.

BetterRide Coach Chip assisting students in a cornering drill designed to ingrain the right habits.

It is great to see Mountain Bike Coaching catching on, good for riders and good for the sport. Unfortunately, like all professions there are great coaches, good coaches, ok coaches and outright dangerous coaches. Often the best coaches aren’t the best athletes, the athletes that had passion but not the physical gifts often study the sport more as they have to make up for their physical short comings with better technique. With this in mind I finally realized that my asthma was a blessing as it forced me to find the most efficient way to ride a bike if I wanted to be competitive against riders with much larger lungs. This plus years of being coached, going to coaching schools, reading all I could and 20 years of coaching experience has really helped me design an effective curriculum that has benefited World Champions and riders just like you.

The moral of the story, don’t believe everything you hear, even it comes from an “expert”.

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I’m sick of being discriminated against! Why Are Mountain Bikers Discriminated Against? There have to be 1,000 times more mountain bike owners than horse owners so why are there way more miles of trail open to horse users? In addition, a few bad apples among those .5 percenters who own horses manage to do 10 times the damage to trails as mountain bikers? Why isn’t there an organization that fights against this discrimination?! I’m not one for frivolous lawsuits but this is a case where someone/group needs to take this to court! Why does such a small minority of trail users have more rights to our public land than we do?

“Tens of thousands who could never afford to own, feed and stable a horse, had by this bright invention enjoyed the swiftness of motion which is perhaps the most fascinating feature of material life”. ~Frances Willard, How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle

Don’t get me wrong, I love horses, they are beautiful creatures. I simply want equal rights with their owners.

Has anyone heard of a group that legally fights for mountain bikers? I used to give over $3,000 a year to a group that I thought did this but it turns out they have never filed a lawsuit. I’m sick of compromises where we give up existing, fun trails for the “right” to build new trails where we already had the right to build new trails. Anyone else fed up with this? Anyone want to file a lawsuit? I’m not a lawyer but I have $3,000 a year I will personally donate to this cause.